In 2008, Zhenghua “Z” Yang was diagnosed with a rare condition in which his body couldn’t form enough blood platelets, meaning his blood couldn’t clot and even a simple cut could be fatal. He was hospitalized for two years, then sent home to rest without real hope for recovery. In this time, he gamed for hours on end. League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Minecraft. What else was he to do? And with time, somewhat miraculously, he recovered and was able to return to college. When he thinks back on getting through it all — mentally at least — those games loom large.
“My first year of college, I thought to myself, ‘Well, these games that I was playing, like League of Legends, they’re not really made to help me right, but they ended up saving my life,’” Yang says. “So what if we start making video games with the intention of helping other people? What kind of power is that able to unlock?”
Now 34, Yang is CEO and co-founder of a unique gaming company, Serenity Forge, that makes deeply emotional, usually weird games that push the idea of what gaming can do. Case in point, Doki Doki Literature Club, a game built around the idea of reading poetry with a group of school girls and then… well, you kind of have to play it for yourself to get it. (Doki Doki was created by Team Salvato; Serenity Forge stepped in to help release a premium “Plus” edition of the game in 2021).
Now in its 10th year, the Colorado-based company is set to do it again with the upcoming Roman Sands RE:Build, which is such a strange game that it too is hard to describe with words. It’s part philosophical puzzle, part apocalyptic adventure, part psychedelic journey — not to mention part service industry simulator.
When the game was first pitched, Serenity Forge’s founders were perplexed, Yang tells Inverse. There were about six pages into a colorful slide deck full of Y2K aesthetics and very broad ideas but no gameplay or demo. Still, Yang says, what they saw was enough to give it the green light.
“There is a part of Roman Sands that is similar to the ‘business model’ of Death Stranding, where it’s just a game jam game that got way too much budget,” Yang says. “It’s a weird-ass concept that someone thought of, and then let’s just throw money at it and make an actual commercial product. It’s unhealthy, I believe, to talk about what Roman Sands is about because it is inherently postmodern.”
In pitch meetings like the one for Roman Sands, Serenity Forge often asks developers a telling question: Imagine if the game being built became the most popular game overnight; what kind of effect would it have on society?
“Is it something that’s good for the world?” Yang says. “Honestly, you’d be surprised at how quickly game pitches fall apart once you slap that question on there. Because most games are either here to make quick money because it’s catching onto the trend, or I just want to make a game that I want to play.” The intention of a game designer that Yang wants to work with should be for the game to make the world better.
Content Warning: This article discusses suicidal ideation and mentions death by suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, call or text 988 to contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, which provides free 24/7 support. You can also reach out to the Trans Lifeline at 1-877-565-8860, the Trevor Lifeline at 1-866-488-7386, or your local suicide crisis center.
Origins
The first game Yang and Serenity Forge co-founder Kevin Zhang made was Loving Life, a nonfiction visual novel about Yang’s near-fatal experience. It turns out Yang did not create this game for someone with his exact health crisis — but to give perspective to a friend who was struggling in a very different way.
Yang described how he had another friend in college, Victor, who got a perfect score on his SAT and got into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) but still felt that he would never be enough for his parents and struggled with mental health. He says he made Loving Life in no small part to inspire Victor. Tragically, his friend died by suicide a day before the game launched.
Learning of Victor’s passing was hard for Yang, who said he still has dreams about it. He wondered: If Loving Life had been completed earlier would it have made an impact on Victor?
Instead of derailing what he was doing, however, Yang felt a renewed drive. His parents, who were originally hesitant about his move to start a video game company, were likewise supportive. “My parents realize just how fragile these things can be, and it made them more open-minded, and it turned from, like, ‘You're either a Wall Street banker or bust’ to a new mentality where it’s just like ‘As long as you’re happy, just be happy,’” he says.
A month after the launch of Loving Life, a teenager in Spain emailed Yang to thank him, saying he had been about to take his own life. Instead, he felt inspired to start making games, too, and enroll in a game design school.
“I looked back at that, and it was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t make a million dollars overnight like some indie game devs do,’” Yang says. “‘But maybe I actually saved someone’s life by making a video game.’”
Crossroads
The path to becoming a video game developer was not a linear one. Yang interned with the Federal Reserve while he was still in college and considered a career in economics.
“A lot of people are going to be like, ‘Oh, that’s boring.’ And obviously, games are more fun,” Yang says. “It was not super obvious that games are more fun for me because I really do enjoy economic policy.”
As a Federal Reserve intern, Yang says he got to wear a suit and tie and stay at a hotel, ordering sesame chicken and wearing a badge that showed he was part of the organization.
“And then I sat there eating my sesame chicken, and I thought to myself whatever high I was getting off of that big-d*ck energy from being a Fed, that was nowhere near the kind of fun I was getting off of working on some game jam with my friends in a basement,” he says.
At one point during the internship, Yang got lunch with the former chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, and asked him for advice. Bernanke allegedly replied that some people in rural China or Africa had to spend hours of their day to find drinking water to feed their families. So if you’re one of the fortunate people in the world who can choose what you want to do, rather than be forced into what you have to do to survive, that is the type of life that can make a real difference in the world. And that’s also how you find true happiness.
The mission
Just two years after Loving Life, in 2014, Yang and Zhang released Lisa: The Painful another example of a game that perfectly met Serenity Forge’s mission.
“This is a game that takes place in a world where women disappear and only men with art are going to run this world,” he says. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, it follows a protagonist who is debating whether he wants to continue living just before he stumbles upon the world’s last surviving baby girl. “And maybe it is also a reflection of what our current world is, to some degree. These are the types of games that some kid in Kansas needs to play, growing up, to give them another perspective that otherwise maybe they never really get from your typical FIFAs or Call of Dutys.”
Smiling and even-mannered, Yang freely mixes anecdotes from a decade in game development with the kind of phrases you might hear in business school. Quoting the founder of Whole Foods, he notes that people have to eat food to live, just like companies need money to survive. However, people don’t live just to eat, and companies shouldn’t survive just to make money.
“I almost died when I was 18. When I look at this, I see all of this as borrowed time, and I’m lucky to be around, so if I just go around and waste my time just making money, what the f*ck, like I can’t take that away with me. The dollars in a bank account don’t matter. That doesn’t mean anything to me.”
In a year when the video game industry has seen a huge rise in layoffs, ironically, this attitude of not caring about money seems to have worked for Yang. The quirky, narrative games that are Serenity Forge’s bread and butter are somewhat resistant to the shocks of the industry, according to Yang, who says that last year the company saw its second-highest revenue ever, and it is on track this year to beat that record.
Like the great creative minds before him, Yang is playing the long game.
“You know, dollar-bin Godfather during Black Friday still sells,” he says. “And so to do these kinds of timeless, more narrative-driven games [that last] with people for a long time. We just got lucky in how we do business and what we care about is to be a lot more resistant to the crazy waves that happen in history.”
